I recently built a oak wood slat accent wall with a french cleat system. Using that I designed matching holders for a book and small flower pot that I can now place anywhere on the wall to spruce it up. A simple yet very flexible system. Making a boring wall Read more…
Decorating a colored wall with matching wooden slats can improve the look of the room and make it a loot more interesting. I build such a wooden slat wall and combined with with a french cleat system to have a modular option of hanging different things like books and flowers Read more…
A couple of years ago I built an (for me at least) amazing custom coffee table from oak and black epoxy. I started to dislike the legs though and started looking for new ones. I found the most awesome solution from a company called Flowyline. This is how it looks Read more…
Air quality is quite important for health reasons and just to make your home more enjoyable. When I found the new Starkvind air purifier from IKEA I decided to test it with ZHA and my Home Assistant instance. Air quiet, relatively cheap air purifier with build in Zigbee sounds great Read more…
If you are using the raspberrypi4-homeassistant Docker images you might have noticed that no newer versions are added anymore. Here is why that is happening and how you can easily still upgrade to the latest version. Docker image sources for Home Assistant There are a couple of different ways to Read more…
I have run the awesome MagicMirror² software on a Pi Zero W in the past. While this works ok the small Pi is not powerful enough for more complex widgets. Here is how the Pi 4 compares and how I set it up to run my magic mirror. Setting up Read more…
In the age of digital photography we all amass a lot of pictures. The question is how to store them? Photoprism is a great self-hosted alternative to cloud tools like Google photos. I recently added it to my own server. Here is how to do that. Managing photo libraries Today, Read more…
The Raspberry Pis are very popular mini computers with a (usually) cheap price and small form factor and power consumption used for many tasks. Is the Pi 4 good enough as a smart home server for Home Assistant? I have been using it for more than a year now and Read more…
Is AI overhyped? Pretty sure! Can it do amazing things anyways? Yes! Can you use it for your smart home? Definitely! Here I will describe how I use ChatGPT for my DIY smart home and how it might be used in the future. I am living under a stone or: Read more…
Despite the numerous smart lighting options out there, I was still on the lookout for the perfect one to light up larger background areas. The Aris Tint LED panel turned out to be a great choice, with its somewhat slim and understated design that easily merges with the wall. Its Read more…